Hamlet, Austin Drama Club at the Off Center, August 19-28

by Brian Paul Scipione

An Unweeded Garden: Austin Drama Club’s 6^th Production of Hamlet

Many will argue in favor of a favorite song or play is but few will put their money on what is the best. It is easiest to pinpoint what is the ultimate movie or band when one is, say, a freshman in college. Shakespeare is the best writer! Death Cab for Cutie is the most sublime band ever! Dostoevsky has captured the true infirmity of the human soul!

Yet as one ages, learns more, reads more and plainly just experiences more, one is likely to leave behind the notion that one is absolutely sure of anything. My favorite Shakespeare play is Measure for Measure but, nonetheless, Hamlet is probably the best of Shakespeares's plays.

Hamlet has the best lead role, the most emphatic villain, the saddest heroine, and comic foils everywhere. The plot is tight and movess between the supernatural and political themes with a seamlessness emulated in everything from Brave New World to Star Wars. Its ending is tragic beyond tragedy and its message as meaningful as it is morose. If a theatre company were to choose one work as their flagship production than they could do no better than this, Shakespeare’s magnum opus.

Of course, many would argue that the play is sprawling, complex, and behooving of a certain reverence: that is, it should not be approached lightly. This viewpoint was evident in the Hamlet produced last year by Black Swan Productions at the Scottish Rite Theatre and, later, at Boggy Creek cemetary.

Japhy Fernandes's most recent vision of the bard’s classic is on a different level, nay, on a different planet from the play’s traditional interpretation and this is by all means refreshing. He has crafted a version that highlights the eight main characters of the play and their stories. All minor characters and sub-plots have been completely excised. Horatio still barks that something is rotten in Denmark, but these characters are far from Denmark.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Hamlet, Austin Drama Club at the Off Center, August 19 - 28

Received directly:

Austin Drama Club

will be producing

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

August 19-21 & 26-28

Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.

Sundays at 8 p.m.

at the Off Center 2211-A Hidalgo Street (click for map)
Tickets are $10

contact: japhyfernandes@live.com

This is Austin Drama Club's sixth production of Hamlet. Founded by Japhy and Ellen Fernandes in 2006, ADC under the alias of "Velvet Rut Theatre" produced Hamlet in December of that same year . Since then, we've done versions with and without many of the familar charactors, but always with the same commitment to telling the story.

This production is performed with 8 actors, has a running time of one hour and a half with two intermissions. What's ground breaking about this production is the addition of extra late shows on Friday and Saturday nights, testing the endurance of 4 cast members over the age of 35.

Rob Novak returns for the second time in the title role. He was most recently in an award-winning production of Hamlet at the Scottish Rite Theatre. This show reunites Japhy with college acting partner Brian Potts, now owner of his own talent agency, in the role of Polonius. Ophelia is played by Elena Weinberg, who is currently in City Theatre's production of The Imaginary Invalid, and is the best actress to come out of the St Edwards theatre program in several years.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Hamlet, Austin Drama Club, December 10 - January 2

Going to an Austin Drama Club production is like Alice's falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Their venue is a house just off E. 7th Street in Austin, Texas, and you enter through a scruffy back yard surrounded by a chain link fence. When my son and I arrived, Jennifer Fielding was standing by the gate on back yard duty. Her question was, "Have you been here before?"

It wasn't a speakeasy challenge question, but rather an offer of guidance. Finding one's way into the theatre space isn't easy the first time, for that small house has been converted with curtains and a miscellany of improvised, tiered seating into a 25-seat ad hoc theatre. Sightlines are so constrained that three closed-circuit televisions offer alternative views into the corners of the playing space. Lighting consists of inexpensive floorlamps and wall-mounted goosenecks wrapped with aluminum foil and masked with gels in deep red and blue.

You could call it underground theatre, except that it isn't underground. Japhy and Ellen Fernandes and friends are more of a cult, one that is dedicated to dark and somewhat deranged productions of the classics, each done on half a shoestring. Their output is impressive. In 2009 they filled out Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays with three-week runs of Talk Radio, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Fool for Love, Henry V, The Wizard of Oz, Richard III, After the Fall and now, again, Hamlet, their fifth presentation in three years of the epic of the melancholy Dane.

Under Japhy's direction, this is a six-person Hamlet, edited down for a two-hour staging that includes two ten-minute intermissions. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern disappear -- as they did in Laurence Olivier's 1948 version. Also gone are Fortinbras and the gravedigger, much to my disappointment. What remains is a quirky Freudian psychodrama in which Shakespeare's language shines fitfully out of the dark.

The character transformations are often striking and often inexplicable. For example, Rob Novak's Hamlet dresses in white tights and short dark tunic but sports a Tyrolean hat and an ice ax, as if old Europe had somehow slipped in space and time. Casey Allen as Leartes (sic) looks like one of the three musketeers. Although Christopher Harris proved himself an articulate and focused actor in their previous Macbeth, here plays Horatio as a dimwit with a pistol.

The favor that Kat Eason as a juicy Ophelia in tight bustier seeks to return to Hamlet is a Playboy magazine with centerfold deliberately unfolded. The Player King phones in his performance -- literally -- and The Mousetrap is an eerie black-and-white pantomime on the television sets. Julio Mella's Polonius shuffles and mumbles. When Hamlet skewers him through the arras, neither Hamlet nor Gertrude investigates the identity of the corpse. After Hamlet berates her, Ellen Fernandes as Gertrude responds with scornful laughter when her son sees the Ghost.

Playing Claudius, director Japhy Fernandes applies an appropriately theatrical demeanor and uses impressive tone and phrasing, although in an occasionally flutey voice. The strength of his personalization of the confused king carries over the other actors like a big clear-channel radio transmitter dominating other signals.

The cast surprises us with the entirely unexpected and unforeshadowed means of Ophelia's demise, a plot development that suggests a rich and enigmatic undertext. There's madness in this Denmark, but Hamlet isn't the lunatic.

The Fernandes couple and friends are waving torches in a menacing darkness. There's potential treasure there, but unfortunately it is never fully revealed. If you can bear with ambiguity, you'll take away some food for thought. And perhaps you'll develop a taste for alt-Shakespeare.

Click to view ADC Hamlet slideshow on MySpace